Senior military leaders look on as US President Donald Trump speaks in Quantico, Virginia. Trump has determined the US is in 'armed conflict' with drug cartels distributing narcotics in the country. Photo / Getty Images
President Donald Trump has determined the United States is in “armed conflict” with drug cartels distributing narcotics in the country, according to a notification to Congress.
The notification seeks to give legal cover for taking lethal action against traffickers following multiple strikes against what the Administration has claimed are Venezuelan boats in international waters.
Some lawmakers and experts have said the notification is a dubious legal justification for what have been unlawful military strikes on alleged civilian criminals in the Western Hemisphere, a far cry from combatants engaged in direct battle with American forces.
Trump directed the Pentagon to conduct operations pursuant to the law of armed conflict after he “determined that the US is in a non-international armed conflict with these designated terrorist organisations” that have helped kill US citizens through drug trafficking, according to a notice transmitted to Senate leadership and congressional committees this week and reviewed by the Washington Post.
“The US has now reached a critical point where we must use force in self-defence and defence of others against the ongoing attacks by these designated terrorist organisations,” the notice reads.
The Administration has described recent strikes against alleged traffickers at sea as targeting Venezuelan gangs, though the notice to Congress, reported earlier by the New York Times, did not name any specific organisations.
In February, Trump designated eight groups as foreign terrorist organisations - six from Mexico and one from El Salvador, MS-13.
One of them was Tren de Aragua, a Venezuela-based group that Trump has said is directed by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
A US intelligence assessment has said that was not true, and experts have said that TdA is not deeply involved in narcotics trafficking.
In July, the Treasury Department also designated the Venezuelan Cartel de los Soles as a global terrorist group, saying it is headed by Maduro and “provides material support to foreign terrorist organisations threatening the peace and security of the US, namely Tren de Aragua” and the Mexico-based Sinaloa Cartel.
Senator Jack Reed (Rhode Island), the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, charged that the Administration left Congress in the dark on the strikes and “offered no credible legal justification, evidence or intelligence” to support the action.
“Every American should be alarmed that their President has decided he can wage secret wars against anyone he calls an enemy,” Reed said in a statement.
Spokespeople for the Republican chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, which provide oversight over the Defence Department, declined to comment.
The US has launched at least three strikes against alleged drug traffickers since early last month, beginning with a September 3 attack on in the Caribbean that killed 11 people, officials have said.
A subsequent strike described in the notification was launched on September 15 against a vessel assessed by intelligence officials as “affiliated with a designated terrorist organisation and, at the time, engaged in trafficking illicit drugs”.
While Trump said the strike killed three people, the notification said it killed “approximately 3 unlawful combatants” without further clarification.
In a statement after the first strike - on a boat the Trump Administration said was operated by Tren de Aragua - a White House spokesperson said it was “fully consistent with the law on armed conflict” and “taken in defence of vital US national interests”.
A presidential statement on September 4 declared that the strike order was “pursuant to my constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and Chief executive to conduct United States foreign relations”.
The new notification intends to codify Trump Administration rhetoric that the US is under siege by cartels, many of which have now been formally designated terrorist groups.
But by declaring an armed conflict against these entities, the Administration is setting up a confrontation with lawmakers in Congress who see the move as legally untenable and an affront to their authority.
Geoffrey Corn, an expert on the law of armed conflict at Texas Tech University Law School, described the Administration’s justification for striking the cartels as “pretext to open the door to extraordinary use of force authority”.
“What is the evidence that these groups are attacking the US?” he said.
“This is not Pancho Villa riding across the border in Columbus, New Mexico, and attacking police stations.”
Trump has repeatedly claimed that more than 300,000 US citizens die of drug overdoses annually.
The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention reported 87,000 overdose deaths for the year ending in September 2024, a nearly 27% decline from the previous year.
The strikes have coincided with US deployment of additional naval vessels to the region, operating out of the Southern Command in Florida, and aircraft sent to a base in Puerto Rico.
In a news conference in Caracas today, Venezuelan Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez said more than five US combat aircraft had been detected flying near the coastline, according to Venezuelan media.
The planes, he said, were flying at about 35,000 feet (10,670m) and were seen by Venezuela’s comprehensive defence system located near the international airport outside the capital.
“We are watching them, and I want you to know that this does not intimidate us, it does not intimidate the people of Venezuela. The presence … of these aircraft flying near our area of influence, in our Caribbean Sea, close to the Venezuelan coast,” Padrino Lopez said, was “a provocation. It is a threat to the security of the nation.”
Pentagon officials said they had no information to share on the issue.
On Thursday, the Pentagon’s general counsel briefed members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who have pressed for weeks to get more information on the strikes.
The meeting focused on the Administration’s legal justification to conduct the attacks, but members of both parties criticised the Defence Department’s message as vague and unsatisfactory, according to two people familiar with the briefing.
“We didn’t get a lot of answers, and there were concerns raised on both sides of the aisle,” said Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire) in an interview with CNN after the briefing.
Senator Adam Schiff (D-California) and Senator Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) plan to introduce a War Powers Resolution to block the Administration from continuing the strikes in the coming days.
In a post on social media last month, Vice- President JD Vance said that “killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military”. When critics called the lack of due process a war crime, Vance said he didn’t “give a s*** what you call it”.
Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), the only GOP lawmaker who has publicly criticised the strikes, called Vance’s dismissive remarks “despicable and thoughtless”, and warned of negative consequences “if the accused were immediately executed without trial or representation”.
John Bellinger, who served as the State Department and National Security Council legal adviser during the George W. Bush administration, said in an email that “the Trump Administration is trying to use familiar international law terms to wedge the President’s determination into the rhetorical frameworks used by the Bush and Obama administrations, but the situations are completely different” from terrorist threats presented by al-Qaeda or Isis, groups which had launched armed attacks against US citizens and military forces.
“Claiming that the US is engaged in a ‘non-international armed conflict’ with Venezuelan drug traffickers, based on the facts provided so far, is an inapt legal analogy that makes a mockery of accepted international law terms, and perhaps that’s what the Trump Administration intends,” Bellinger said.
Corn argued in a Post opinion piece that Trump’s decision to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities without notifying Congress was consistent with both international law and the Constitution because Tehran’s weapons programme amounted to an imminent threat of armed attack against the US.
But that is far from the action of cartels and traffickers, he said, who at worst have brought drugs and migrants to the US, making it implausible to suggest they are inflicting harm at the scale analogous to those carried out by terror groups like al-Qaeda.
“This is about rule of law and respect for limits on the power of the state to employ deadly force,” he said.
“It can’t be a self-licking ice cream cone where you start the war so you can say you’re in a war.”
- John Hudson contributed to this report.
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor’s Picks, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week’s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here.